Matisse quotes:

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In the end there is only Matisse. -- Pablo Picasso
All things considered, there is only Matisse. -- Pablo Picasso
I'd like to write the way Matisse paints. -- A. S. Byatt
I've photographed everybody from Matisse to Isamu Noguchi. -- Carl Van Vechten
Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys. -- Peter Schjeldahl
I can only paint in India. Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque India belongs only to me. -- Amrita Sher-Gil
When I tried to do something else, everyone behaved as if I was Gypsy Rose Lee trying to paint a Matisse. -- Zoë Heller
You couldn't forget [Pablo] Picasso, [Henri] Matisse and [Joan] Miro either. And it had to be, you know, at least as good or better. -- Frank Stella
My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them. -- Jean Cocteau
In the dream world of Matisse and the gritty reality of American frontier, the diversity of women in our society offers the chance for greater exploration and even greater inspiration. -- Vera Wang
Look, Matisse I ain't. You know how they have on the invitations, a reception for the artist will be held at... And I say, Look, you gotta change this. I'm not an artist. I'm a photographer, a skilled craftsman. -- Phil Stern
Art comes from art: I remember going to the Matisse show and seeing how Matisse had taken one of his own paintings, worked from it and transformed it, and that had led on to the next one and the next. -- Anthony Caro
It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby. -- John Berger
I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later. -- Joni Mitchell
Matisse renovates rather than innovates. -- Guillaume Apollinaire
Near the end of his life, Henri Matisse's preferred attire was evening wear, -- Holland Cotter
It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered land of the ugly. -- Gelett Burgess
I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures. -- Mordicai Gerstein
When I tried to do something else, everyone behaved as if I was Gypsy Rose Lee trying to paint a Matisse. -- Zoë Heller
In their pursuit of the same supreme end, Matisse and Picasso stand side by side, Matisse representing color and Picasso form. -- Wassily Kandinsky
Simplicity can have a negative impact when it's the crude reduction of nuances beyond appreciation: a Matisse presented as a 16-color GIF. -- Matt Mullenweg
Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten. -- Howard Hodgkin
I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don't have enough millions to own one. And I don't really believe in owning art, anyway. -- Ravi Shankar
You cannot deny your origins: I love Kirchner more than Matisse, although Matisse was a greater artist. That isn't to do with nationality. It's a stronger feeling. -- Georg Baselitz
Don't feel you have to buy something to sit in or at. Buy something you are emotionally attached to and build your design around that. One Matisse cutout poster could provide you with your whole color scheme! -- Alexandra Stoddard
Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, 'Not really.' -- Ellsworth Kelly
Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about... I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there... to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution... -- David Hockney
Matisse and Picasso' is a little like Plato after Socrates. Socrates only taught in words. He didn't write. And after that, you had Plato and Aristotle to write about what he had said. I write about them because they didn't write about them. -- Francoise Gilot
My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her. -- Jacob Rothschild
I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments. -- Ellsworth Kelly
The problem with Matisse is that I can't ever figure out when he's done a good painting or a bad painting because I don't know how to analyse him. I just know that I like the way he put it on and I like his airs and forms. -- Susan Rothenberg
I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse. -- Amy Bloom
People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing. -- Tim Burton
My best efforts were some modern things that looked like very lousy Matisses. Thank God I had the sense to realize they were lousy, and leave Paris. -- Norman Rockwell
But I'm interested in the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia. I hear there are some of the worst Matisses there. I like seeing bad art by good artists. It's inspiring. I'm able to identify with them. It makes them real. -- Jemima Kirke
The Matisse seemed to respond to the decreasing light by increasing its own wattage. Every object in the room was drained of color, but the Matisse stood firm in the de-escalating illumination, its beauty turning functionality inside out, making itself a more practical and useful presence than anything else in sight. -- Steve Martin
To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new. Even Matisse painted some of his Fauvist pictures in anxiety. Maybe that helped him to simplify. Character, discipline, negative capability count. Write, complete, revise. If it doesn't work, begin something else. -- Bernard Malamud
Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less. -- Maya Angelou
Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe . And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world. -- David Hockney
If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials. -- Henri Matisse

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